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Researchers finger digital marketing agency Rafotech A strain of Chinese browser-hijacking malware dubbed Fireball has infected 250 million computers.…

When you wanna be lit af, like manual scripting It's strange when you're no longer the new kid on the block. First, you're the hippest of the hip, the one that everyone envies and then, suddenly, you're looking that little bit older, and generally less interesting.…

Pay me $500 in Bitcoin or... oh look, everyone's dead Something for the Weekend, Sir? Nothing could hurry Cool Dave. Tall and taciturn, he would make his way around school between classes at his own pace. When he talked, he not so much spoke as delivered a quiet soliloquy in a thoughtful and deliberate manner.…

Four workers to each pensioner just doesn't add up The ratio of people in the workforce to those in retirement will fall from 8:1 to 4:1 by 2050 if retirement ages do not change, and the global economy will not be able to bear the burden, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said…

The NTFS diet sorted things out in more ways than one ON-CALL Friday's here again and so, therefore, is On-Call, our weekly dip into absurd tech support tales contributed by readers.…

Combined might of Microsoft, Musk and other tech titans couldn't persuade Prez to stay in climate pact United States President Donald Trump's decision to walk away from the Paris climate change agreement has been met by a chorus of disgruntlement from the technology industry.…

Chemical analysis of Gale Crater finds Martian lakes were a lot like ours Mars' Gale Crater was once home to a body of water “that offered favorable conditions for microbial life” thanks to stratification that meant different parts of the lake offered different conditions.…

The market's growing fast, but only the cheap stuff with no strings attached is selling Virtual reality headsets are moving at a rate of 2.3 million a quarter, but cheap and simple devices dominate the market.…

2018 Camry's infotainment system will run Automotive Grade Linux The Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux project is celebrating its first big-name user, after Toyota said it will employ the OS in the 2018 Camry model it will sell in the United States.…

End-user computing biz turns a corner but markets worry about billings VMware's posted a strong first quarter for 2018, hauling US$1.74bn through the door, nine per cent more than Q1 2016, and posting GAAP net income of $232 million, up from Q1 2016's $161m.…

eCW body-slammed by Uncle Sam A health records software company will have to pay $155m to the US government to settle accusations it was lying about the data protection its products offered.…

New version pushes Python language Microsoft has updated its AI framework with the launch of Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 on Thursday.…

Selected travelers will have to provide usernames, detailed travel histories and more Through the end of November, individuals seeking a visa to travel to the US may be asked to provide usernames for social media accounts going back five years, subject to the discretion of consular officials.…

Hitches ride with Ariane after SpaceX drops the ball American comms specialist ViaSat is set to put the world's most powerful communications satellite into orbit on Thursday afternoon atop an Ariane rocket.…

The worst thing to happen to Samsung Mobile in at least a few months Samsung has confirmed that it will be delaying the release of its Bixby voice assistant in the US, after the software showed problems with processing English-language requests.…

Gated community sees life beyond its borders Taking another tentative step toward openness, Apple says it will tweak its Swift Playgrounds educational coding app to interface with programmable toys, drones, and musical instruments.…

The third time's the charm Physicists working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have spotted gravitational waves rippling through the universe for the third time, according to results published in Physical Review Letters on Thursday.…

HP, Asus, Lenovo ring in brown trouser time for Intel Qualcomm has named HP, Asus and Lenovo as its first partners to sell ARM-based Windows 10 PCs.…

Recycling kit to lower costs is key to Musk's goals Updated On Thursday afternoon, SpaceX is planning to relaunch a Dragon supply capsule that already spent a month in space nearly three years ago.…

Binging for pennies The uptake for Microsoft's long-suffering search engine, Bing, continues to be so dismal that Redmond has resorted to paying people to use it.…

Component shortages, forex and 'stiff competition' blamed for Q2 crappiness The long feted turnaround of Hewlett Packard Enterprise has yet to show up after the misfiring tech corp reported another set of quarterly declines, and it’ll surprise no one that cost cutting is going to feature heavily once again.…

Still struggling? Your files might be recoverable after all Mistakes in the WannaCrypt ransomware worm might allow files to be restored after infection.…

Penalties double, but it's nothing next to GDPR The UK is among the most fined nations in Europe for data protection breaches, doubling the amount of penalties to £3.2m (€3.6m) during 2016.…

Look, here's some stuff I read on the internet about infosec and it's terribly worrying isn't it? A group of anti-nuclear campaigners have claimed Britain’s nuclear deterrent submarines are vulnerable to hackers – and their report setting out the “evidence” quotes, in part, from Wikipedia.…

Saucy Japanese chip-fryer tries to swallow its JV stake Loss-ridden Toshiba has pulled an unexpected move which it hopes will allow it to auction off its flash memory unit for a big pile of cash within the month. It says it has reabsorbed assets from its flash foundry JV with Western Digital Corp.…

WannaCrypt? Actually human error is the biggest problem The UK health sector accounts for nearly half (43 per cent) of all data breaches, according to new research.…

Er, sorry, ignore that, say red-faced admins Edinburgh University in Scotland has insisted a "system error" caused this year's graduands to be told by email that they wouldn't be receiving their degrees after all.…

Lectures, workshops and networking (both kinds) this October Events We’re thrilled to reveal the first batch of conference speakers for the Minds Mastering Machines (M3) three-day dive into machine learning, AI and advanced analytics this autumn.…

Foreign firms may suddenly find doing business there difficult China's new cyber-security laws, which come into effect on Thursday, may make it harder for foreign businesses to trade in the country.…

More like Giffgaffe... but good news if you're going to Spain Giffgaff customers may want to think twice before holidaying in tax havens such as the Channel Islands as new roaming charges will hike calls to back to Blighty to £1 per minute – up from the current 0.5p rate.…

Containers just wanna be hypervisors Just occasionally, you get it right. Six years ago, I called containers "every sysadmin's dream," and look at them now. Even the Linux Foundation's annual bash has been renamed from "LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference" to "LinuxCon + ContainerCon".…

Who're you calling remote? One commonly thinks, when the word "hybrid" is used, of an infrastructure that combines on-premise (or at least private data centre) and public cloud. But "hybrid" also works in the other direction - across the heterogeneous systems within a particular location.…

Not an option for underpinning payment systems at present Underpinning wholesale payment systems with distributed ledger technology (DLT) would introduce greater costs and risks for institutions than those which apply under existing wholesale payment systems, the Bank of Canada has said.…

Blog reveals breach. Email warns of data compromise. Support page says crypto at risk Identity management outfit OneLogin has revealed it's suffered a security incident that's seen “unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our US data region”, but has offered rather scarier information in different documents.…

Twin-fusealge, six-engined satellite-slinger has wider wings than the Spruce Goose Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has shown off the “Stratolaunch”, a colossal aircraft he hopes can soon help to hoist satellites into low earth orbit.…

You're only as secure as your suppliers and some military contractors look to be well leaky “Cyber resilience” company UpGuard claims to have found a publicly-accessible AWS S3 bucket full of classified US intelligence data.…

Evidence could uncover how oceans formed on Earth NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured evidence that shows that parts of the Moon may be coated in thin bits of frost, and it could help scientists unlock the mystery of how water ended up on Earth.…

Eight weeks needed to sort out missing pieces of Jigsaw platform module system Oracle's asked for more time to sort out Java 9 in light of the community's rejection of the proposed Java Platform Module System.…

Another thing cloud's changed: it used to be be server-makers that trumpeted CPU exclusives A member of Intel's new “Xeon Scalable Family” has appeared in Google's cloud.…

'Approximately US$100m' to change hands for assets hoped to generate $200m a year Avaya and Extreme Networks have confirmed that the former will sell its networking business to the latter, for “approximately US$100m”.…

Indian services firm says it will hire more Americans too, but MAGA plan isn't a setback Indian tech services company Tech Mahindra last week revealed that US president Donald Trump's tightening of H-1B visas for skilled workers will be a minor irritant at worst, and perhaps an opportunity to send more jobs offshore.…

Appeals court sees no problem with life sentence Ross Ulbricht has lost his bid to set aside his life sentence for selling illegal drugs through the now defunct underground website Silk Road.…

Tesla boss says he won't work with The Donald if global warming deal snubbed Elon Musk says he will cut ties with President Trump, should the US walk away from the Paris Climate Accord.…

Dems want to get to the bottom of comment flood A group of Senate Democrats is asking the FBI to take a close look at the reported "denial of service" the FCC blamed for the collapse of its comment system earlier this month.…

It's all in the name of medicine, they say A group of scientists has focused the world’s most powerful X‑ray beam on a molecule to test out the Linac Coherent Light Source at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.…

Adds Kubernetes and etcd as services in Tectonic CoreOS Fest CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi spent his morning on Wednesday biting the hands that fed attendees at his company's conference, CoreOS Fest 2017.…

Berlin bench rules against parents' access to teen's account A German appeals court has ruled that Facebook does not need to give the parents of a deceased teen access to the child's account.…

Jail for one, pass for so-called celebs in sex tape case Two Tuesday court rulings in the strange Sunshine State of Florida have given very mixed messages on the rights of phone users to keep their passcodes private.…

Gang used lifted codes, stolen logins to bypass onboard security A Tijuana-based biker gang is accused of hacking hundreds of trucks over two and a half years as part of a multi-million-dollar auto theft ring.…

Contextualising Corbyn's improving numbers I hate to say I told you so but, tell a lie, I told you so. As the election campaign heads into the home straight, could the unthinkable be on the cards? Could Theresa May, who started some four weeks ago with what was widely regarded as an unassailable lead, be on the verge of losing?…